19-09-2017, 12:36 PM
A database management system (DBMS) is a system software for creating and managing databases. The DBMS provides users and programmers with a systematic way to create, retrieve, update, and manage data. A DBMS enables end users to create, read, update, and delete data in a database. The DBMS essentially serves as an interface between the database and end users or application programs, ensuring that data is constantly organized and remains easily accessible.
The DBMS handles three important things: data, the database engine that allows access to data, block and modify them, and the database schema, which defines the logical structure of the database. These three fundamental elements help to provide concurrency, security, data integrity and uniform management procedures. Typical database management tasks supported by the DBMS include change management, performance monitoring / tuning, and backup and recovery. Many database management systems are also responsible for automated rollbacks, restarts and recovery, as well as recording and auditing the activity.
The DBMS is perhaps the most useful to provide a centralized view of data that can be accessed by multiple users, from multiple locations, in a controlled manner. A DBMS can limit the data that the end user sees, as well as how the end user can view the data, providing many views of a single database schema. End users and software programs are free to have to understand where the data is physically located or what type of storage medium resides because the DBMS handles all requests.
The DBMS can provide both logical and physical data independence. This means it can protect users and applications from the need to know where data is stored or have to worry about changes in the physical structure of data (storage and hardware). As long as programs use the application programming interface (API) for the database provided by the DBMS, developers will not have to modify programs simply because changes have been made to the database.